Feminist at the gates of reason: An interview with Phyllis Chesler
By Bernard Chapin
web posted January 2, 2006
Dr. Phyllis Chesler is a long time feminist who eventually had
enough of the pervasive groupthink permeating her social and
professional interactions. She regarded issues such as national
security, anti-Semitism, and the suffering of women in the third
world as being far more important than sticking to the feminist
party line and staying in the good graces of her peers. Her refusal
to self-censor alienated her from many a hardened activist. Dr.
Chesler disseminated her views in venues where they could be
appreciated which resulted in increased interaction with
conservatives. One such conservative was David Horowitz who
featured her work on his website, www.frongpagemag.com.
What her pieces said was of little importance to feminists who
would make her persona non grata for appearing on Horowitz’s
site alone. The nature of today’s feminist movement is thoroughly
documented in her latest book, The Death Of Feminism.
Her curriculum vitae reflects a lifetime of accomplishments. Dr.
Chesler is an Emerita Professor of psychology and women's
studies, and co-founder of the Association for Women in
Psychology along with the National Women's Health Network,
and the International Committee for Women of the Wall. Her
website, www.phyllis-chesler.com, lists many of her
achievements, and, publication wise, they are extensive. Her
titles include works such as Women and Madness; Women,
Money and Power; About Men; With Child: A Diary of
Motherhood; Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and
Custody; Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M; Patriarchy:
Notes of an Expert Witness; Feminist Foremothers in Women's
Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health; Letters to a Young
Feminist; Woman's Inhumanity To Woman; Women of the Wall:
Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism's Holy Site; and The New
Anti-Semitism. The Current Crisis and What We Must Do
About It.
BC: Dr. Chesler, my compliments to you on the publication of
your new book, The Death Of Feminism. Might you, just in case
our readers are unaware, inform us as to what prompted its
writing and why it will be of interest to conservatives.
PC: I appreciate your kind words. The failure of progressives
and leftists, including feminists, to mute their hatred and
scapegoating of both America and Israel, post the 2000 Intifada
that Arafat launched against the Jewish state and post 9/11,
compelled me to both acknowledge this failure and to try to
understand it. Secular progressives have accused conservatives
of being dangerously intolerant. I have found that intolerance,
conformity, and totalitarian group-think are also alive and well
among progressive journalists, activists, and professors--most of
whom have been thoroughly Palestinianized. The courage of
independent thinking is crucial, as is intellectual diversity, no
matter the ideology. My previous work about anti-Semitism,
(The New Anti-Semitism), brought me into the conservative
world, where I have found that many conservatives do honor
independent thinking and are intellectually profoundly diverse as
well. This does not mean that we agree on all issues; not at all.
But why should we? Of course, some conservatives are also
rigid Party Line thinkers. The tendency towards intolerance and
conformity exists everywhere, alas.
BC: Despite your rightward turn, am I correct in saying that you
still consider yourself to be a “radical feminist?” Might I also ask
whether the Christina Hoff Sommers distinction between “equity
feminists” and “gender feminists” be applicable to you?
PC: I have often held an honorable minority position among
feminists on issues such as pornography, prostitution, surrogacy,
motherhood, and cultural relativism. I have never been a gender-
neutral feminist: I do think that men and women are different and
that such differences are not always best served by drafting
gender neutral legislation. I believe that a feminist can also be a
patriot and believe in God and in the reality of a just war. She
can also be a Zionist and a capitalist. These views are not the
views of the feminist professoriate. However, genuine, bona fide
feminists are currently working in the Bush administration against
the trafficking in women and children. I honor such work. I have
not changed my mind about a woman's right to economic or
reproductive freedom but I do not demonize those who may
disagree with me on these and other points. I believe that
western civilization is under both cultural and military siege and
that we must fight to survive. We must forge alliances with each
other against jihad, no matter who we may vote for and no
matter what ideological flag we may happen to salute.
BC: Your attempt, via this latest book, to forge a reconciliation
between right and left over the need to defend our nation against
Islamofascism is highly admirable. That being said, have you had
any successes thus far in this regard? Has your bravery
combating pervasive politically correct groupthink become
infectious? Have you given others the courage to speak up in
favor of the west?
PC: Slowly, and in small ways, I have inspired and empowered
some feminists to begin to question whether President Bush
really does pose a greater threat than Osama bin Laden and al-
Qaeda; whether Israel really can be blamed for all the world's
sorrows and/or if Israel ceased to exist whether Islamic gender
and religious Apartheid, tyranny, genocide, etc. would instantly
vanish without a trace; whether, as feminists, we have an
obligation to help forge a feminist foreign policy rather than
continue to oppose our government while we are under siege.
For example, when I spoke at the CUNY Graduate Center for
the National Organization for Women in October of 05, many
left feminists, led by Katha Pollitt of Nation magazine, tried to
intimidate and humiliate both bodies for having given me the
forum since, in their view, I was no longer a feminist since I had
voted for Bush and had supported the war in Afghanistan and
Iraq. Neither NOW nor CUNY folded. The President of
NOW-NYS, Marcia Pappas, finally wrote a very positive
review of The Death Of Feminism and has taken a courageous
stand on behalf of my first amendment rights. And, more
important, Muslim dissidents and feminists, most recently from
Iran , have been thrilled that an American feminist leader is
daring to speak out on their behalf. "Finally,” one Iranian said, "a
feminist leader who will not abandon us to her theory of cultural
relativity." On December 14, 2005 I testified in a Senate briefing
about Islamic gender Apartheid. The panel was beamed up live
via satellite and transmitted to the Middle East and Central Asia
and translated into Arabic, Persian, and Kurdish. Some
feminists, including left-wing feminists, were excited about my
doing this--even though most of the Senate offices present were
from the Republican side of the aisle. The left and liberal media
did not cover this excellent panel, which was coordinated by
Americans for Democracy in the Middle East nor, to date, have
they reviewed my book.
BC: One of the things that stood out in your text was the way
you came down on post-modernism and its mendacious mantra,
“there is no such thing as truth.” How is it possible that such a
fallacious notion has been so widely embraced within our
universities? Is not the search for the truth the very reason why
colleges were created in the first place?
PC: Oh, how right you are. But these days, truth is held hostage
to our notions of multi-cultural relativity. Truth does exist, not
everything is relative. More: In my opinion, many western values
and virtues are superior to Islamic values and virtues. The much
touted "diversity" increasingly refers to a diversity of color, class,
gender, and sexual preference, but not to a diversity of opinion.
This would be funny if it were not tragic. The politically correct
line on Western campuses has become quite narrow and
intolerant and does not allow one to stray from the party line.
Doing so invites slander and ostracism.
BC: I felt that your second chapter called “Women and the
Crisis of Independent Thinking” was magnificent. I think you
broke new ground in these pages. You have astutely observed
that conformity is more prevalent within women than men, but,
for those without access to your words, why is this the case?
PC: Once more, thanks for your kind words. Girls and women
may be hard-wired to appease and to please; they are also
further socialized to do so. Girls and women are still taught to be
polite, not to disagree, to hide their own opinions--lest they hurt
or offend someone who will then disconnect from them, gossip
slanderously about them, get an entire group to ostracize them.
Girls are not necessarily encouraged to speak their minds directly
and openly, but indirectly and covertly. And, from pre-
adolescence on, girls know how punitive and cruel other girls can
be. Like men, women internalize sexist ideas but unlike men, are
allowed and expected to compete hard against other women and
to also police women into patriarchal line. I wrote about this in
my tenth book Woman's Inhumanity To Woman and again in
The Death Of Feminism. If democracy cannot flourish without
independent thinking and whistle-blowers and if democracy
cannot flourish without the participation of women--we are in
trouble, both at home and abroad in Muslim countries, at least
until or unless women are systematically taught how to withstand
the punishment that being an independent thinker often entails.
The working title of my new book was The Individualist's
Dilemma--but I had also wanted to call it My Afghan Captivity
And Other Tales Of Islamic Gender Apartheid because that is
also what the book is about.
BC: We know that women and men have similar means on
practically every measure of intelligence, but there is a uniformity
among female scores not as pronounced within male scores–i.e.,
women are more closely bunched around the statistical mean;
whereas, more men are found at the extremes. This is apparent
in males being over-represented in the areas which we would
label as genius and mentally retarded. I’ve often wondered if the
unevenness of the respective population distributions is the basis
for why men so readily accept organizational hierarchies, and are
less alienated when standing out from the crowd. As a
psychologist, do you think that this bunching of women around
the statistical mean may exert an influence on the desire to
conform?
PC: In a sense, from the psychological point of view, women
are--and are expected to be--the true conservatives and to
conform to and enforce the status quo--beginning with getting
other women to toe the line. When Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice met with Saudi women, those allowed to meet
with her told her that they did not feel oppressed or
discriminated against and wanted to be governed by Sharia law.
Often, it is women who enforce the practice of female genital
mutilation; they do so because they want their daughters and
granddaughters to remain marriageable and to preserve the
"honor" of their families and tradition. In general, from a
psychological point of view, women everywhere often stay close
together, tend the hearth, hold reality steady for their families,
support religion. While many exceptions exist, most women are
not comfortable "leaving home" psychologically. There is good
reason for this. They are terribly punished when they do by
patriarchal mores. (Unless, of course, they join all-female Total
Institutions such as a convent or religious group).
BC: It seems to me that conformity has had a corrosive effect on
the nation’s politics over the last few decades. More and more
the state imposes itself upon our economy and confiscates an
ever-increasing percentage of its citizen’s earnings. Why do you
think so many women turn to the government to solve practically
everything when the government, so glaringly, solves practically
nothing?
PC: Women understandably turn to the state regarding issues of
violence against women, including incest, rape, and domestic
battering. But, you have a point. Bureaucratic statism is
increasingly inefficient and costly. The politicization of social
services is also inefficient and costly. In certain instances I favor
state support of religious groups who provide such services more
humanely. For example, I was impressed by the Christian groups
that conducted humanitarian missions to the Sudan on behalf of
the African victims of Arab ethnic Muslim genocide and
especially on behalf of the victims of what I call "gender
cleansing" in the Sudan --genitally mutilated women and girls
who were repeatedly and publicly gang-raped. I would have
supported some state funding for their mission of mercy abroad.
I might also support state funding for religious groups who
attempt to help the victims of prostitution and trafficking escape
their desperate fate. However, this is still our taxpayer dollar
which is far too strained as it is.
BC: Do you think that most women are naturally pre-disposed to
being on the left? That there are so few female libertarians is a
source of great disappointment to rational men everywhere, but
is it unlikely that this will ever change? One commentator stated
that she thought:
[W]omen are natural socialists. We want everyone to share and
everyone to get along. We are nurturers, and we expect the
"haves" to take care of the "have-nots," the strong to take care of
the weak, and the brave to protect the others (hence, the "death
grip"). We want everyone to like us and we want everyone to
like each other.
Does this explain why it is so difficult to convince people that a
need exists for limitations on government’s role in our daily
affairs?
PC: Who is this commentator? Introduce me to her at once.
[Allison Brown, “Female Libertarians,”
lewrockwell.com-10/25/03] The description is, to some extent,
still accurate. I write about this in both The Death Of Feminism
and in Woman's Inhumanity To Woman. However, women do
not necessarily "nurture" other women; wealthy women do not
necessarily share their wealth with impoverished women, or treat
their female domestic servants kindly, etc. Women are not
peaceful towards each other--but wish to appear peaceful. It is
the "feminine" thing to do. Thus, to the extent to which traditional
concepts of femininity and womanliness are being challenged and
rejected by women, I expect to see more "male" like behavior,
including libertarian thinking.
BC: Your story of Afghan captivity was impossible to put down.
Without giving the plot away, may I say that you made the
luckiest of escapes. Even with the large amount of information
we have available regarding that nation your account remains
illuminating. I guess what I’d like to know is how you became a
radical feminist after your return from the east in 1961. In view of
the tremendous hell you went through, it seems to me that your
stance on the United States should not have been counter-
cultural. After experiencing dhimmitude first hand, would not
conservatism have been a more likely reaction?
PC: What a good question! Upon my return to America , I did
join the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, and I did
become a leader in the nascent feminist movement. However, I
also completed my PhD in psychology and began teaching at a
branch of the City University of New York. At that time, the
only conservatives I met were those who strongly opposed the
entrance of women into the academic world and who scorned
any and all feminist interpretations of reality. Thus, I did not
encounter libertarian conservatives on the subject of gender
equality or on other issues of social injustice. But, equally true,
the politically correct Left was rising in the world just then and I
was carried along on its considerably mighty currents. However,
due to my Afghan captivity, I never romanticized Third World
countries and understood that many barbaric Muslim customs
were not due to European imperialism or colonialism, or to
American foreign policy. Of course, there was much to criticize
about American and Western misogyny and I proceeded to do
so--but I was always clear that, from a feminist point of view,
America was still head and shoulders above most Third World
countries in terms of freedom, individual rights, human rights, and
women's rights. Not perfect--just further along the road.
BC: Lastly, and regrettably, I must ask a rather adversarial
question. I simply cannot understand your respect for Andrea
Dworkin whose death offers up final and irrefutable proof that fat
is not a feminist issue but a cardiovascular one. Such a
psychological projectionist is rarely encountered nowadays
outside of a textbook. Her statement: "Hatred of women is a
source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right" is absurd, but
clearly it would be correct if she altered the sentence to read,
“My hatred of men is a source of sexual pleasure for me.” In
your book, I laughed aloud when I came across this sentence in
reference to her: “Dworkin once compared the Jewish God to a
Nazi without mercy.” It is unfortunate that she’ll never have an
opportunity to discuss this matter with Him as I’m certain she
now resides in a place far away from Jehovah’s kingdom. I have
no doubt that if a man displayed the same pernicious contempt
for women that Dworkin did for men they would be investigated
by the Department of Justice and sent to Marion for several
decades. In light of all this, I must now ask, what can you
possibly find redeeming about this individual? Obviously, it
cannot be a result of her professional output.
PC: I did not agree with many of Dworkin's points or with her
interpersonal style. But, since I knew her well, you must trust me
when I tell you that she may have disliked women far more than
she disliked men and that she was, in many ways, male-
identified. Although often tempted, I generally try not to
psychiatrically diagnose works of thought or their creators.
However, Dworkin's understanding that pornography and
prostitution were harmful to women was visionary and brilliant
and daring. She was very badly treated for her views on this
subject. I deeply disagreed with her views of men, sex, religion,
and Israel and on her decisions about whom to trust and work
with and in what way. I broke with her several times over such
issues and, regrettably, had not seen her in the years before her
recent death. I happen to admire her fiction and her essays about
The Writing Life. But Sir, surely you jest about men being
committed to Marion for decades for pernicious misogyny? We
might have to cage all the men in the Islamic world (and a mere
handful here as well for decades if we judged them on their
misogyny).
I have enjoyed this dialogue enormously. Thank you for it.
BC: And thank you very much for your time, Dr. Chesler.
Bernard Chapin is a writer living in Chicago. He can be reached
at bchapafl@hotmail.com. This interview originally appeared on
IntellectualConservative.com.
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